Elizabeth Kate Switaj

A
dark room, as any gothic heroine will tell you, holds mystery and danger; a
darkroom, however, houses both these things and a process of delicate creation
as well. Under a red or yellow bulb, chemicals bring forth glimpses of life,
moments of captured light—but if the paper is left too long, the image can be
destroyed. If you touch the chemicals, instead of using tongs, you might get
burned. In Marisa Frasca’s Via Incanto:
Poems from the Darkroom, the chemical baths that bring forth the pictures
of her life stretch across two languages, from Sicily to New York, from
ancestral or childhood memories to the experience of an immigrant. These
chemicals that make her, or, more properly, make the life of the speaker,
demand various shapes—couplets, long broken or indented lines, prose poetry, a
tight-lined and isolated quatrain—but all work through the same drive, this
making of the image of life, so that the voice remains consistent—or at least
as consistent as a developing person can be—through developer, toner, and
fixer.

And
the pictures are vivid. In “Sicilian Blood Oranges” the final snapshot-stanza
shows these fruits new-fallen to the ground and kicked by the speaker “until
the blood / stopped flowing.” The blood is the juice of the now-desiccated
oranges but also the menstrual flow of a woman who has been taught that her
period is shameful and dirty. The poem, and the woman, develop through being
told not to touch plants because

the plants—plants wilt—

die—when you have

the thing

your
things

In
these lines the dashes, restarts, and corrections (dropping the definite
article from plants, swapping it for apossessive pronoun later), as much as the reference to menstruation as
“thing” or “things,” communicates the unspeakability of menstruation both to
the reader and to the speaker of the poem who here relates what she was told
when young. A syntactic hinge connects these lines to the next stanza, in which
she is warned to keep her legs crossed because

Men can see—

smell

our silent mating calls.

Following
these warnings, the act of kicking the blood out of the oranges becomes an
attack on menstruation and, thus, a displaced attack on her own body. She
destroys the ripened ovaries of plants because she cannot destroy the systems
inside her.

Many
of the other images are of people rather than things—family, friends, long-lost
relatives like the speaker’s “. . . great-grandmother Catena. Her name / means
Chain. She sits on caned chair in front of our door on Via Bixio” (“Catena in
Black Shawl”). There also people glimpsed briefly through a tourist lens. In
“Disposable Goods,” that lens witnesses underage prostitutes in Cambodia

. . . taught to lick

their lips—hold up three

little fingers—say Yum Yum

Boom
Boom—$50 for three

The
first line break hints at the other, sexual licking that they have had to
learn, and the image becomes part of the collection’s exploration of the
mistreatment of women, no less important for being seen from a distance and
influencing, too, the speaker’s own growth, as she comes to see her story in a
global context rather than a merely personal or familiar one.

Similarly,
there are photographs seen only “[i]n the week-end New York Times”:

There are in-laws
gripping hand tools with pivoted jaws

Pulling out fingernails
from Sahar Gul,

Gangly bride, 13,
moaning on piles of hay

because
she refused to do her chores or have sex with her much older husband, according
to “Sonnet for a Girl.” These witnessed events, though seen second-hand, shape
the woman who voices these poems, too. They become part of what the world means
to her and lead her to ask “Which god officiates these temples of fire? / Same
as creates peaceful seas, shelters, clinics?” The global context becomes a
spiritual one as well.

Besides
the figurative darkroom in which such images develop, these poems also have a
real darkroom, the space where the speaker’s father made his art, a space thus
inseparable from her origins. In “In the Darkroom,” the speaker, as a young
girl, watches her father print photographs from Carnevale and retouch some images to give their subjects more
normative appearances:

Customers said Signor
Frasca was Jesus

fixing the deformed;
others called him

“The Photographer God.”
What mystery the dark!

In
the dark, he creates new people (because these images could never be the people
themselves and, with his fixes, they are not even approximations of them), even
as the poem’s speaker has been recreated, as she grows up, through the chemical
baths of people working to create her according to different ideals.

Eventually,
in “Depth of Field,” she takes up this process, becoming an artist and the
developer of her identity, though reluctant at first and, even in the act,
never wholly apart from outside influence:

Father, is that you
dangling the red light bulb

behind my eyes from your
grave? Why

do you come so late in
fountain rush of thought

rising like an Oligarch
Christ?

I don’t have 50 years. It
takes that long

to become a poet.

Yet
she does make this choice, to “narrate beginnings before the world / became
criminal murdering love,” to say how the artichoke’s heart must be prepared by
that love “so needles won’t stick in my throat.” It is this choice that gives
us these poems from the darkroom.

How
outsides influences and acts of self-fashioning add up to a whole image, how
they work inside us to make us who we become remains dark—what mystery, indeed!
But through powerful imagery and language, Marisa Frasca has shown us one
branched and varied route to becoming one Via
Incanto.